The Trump administration announced that Temporary Protected Status for more than 260,000 El Salvadorans will end in September 2019.
Wochit

Juana Villanueva of Newark, left, and her daughter, Liane Taracena, 18, who was born in the United States. “I’ve paid taxes for many years, and I’ve made a life here for many years, and I think I deserve residency,’’ Villanueva said.(Photo: Viorel Florescu/NorthJersey.com)

About 86,000 Honduran nationals, including nearly 5,000 in New Jersey, are nervously waiting to find out if the Trump administration will remove them from a program that granted them temporary permission to live and work in the United States.

Protection for Hondurans under the program, called Temporary Protected Status, is set to expire on July 5, and the government has until this weekend — 60 days before the expiration — to announce whether to extend it.

If the program is not extended for Honduras, Honduran citizens with TPS must begin to prepare to depart the United States. If they elect to stay and cannot adjust their status, they will join more than 11 million immigrants who are living in the United States illegally and will be at risk for immigration detention and deportation.

"I don’t want to leave, because my daughter needs me. She always has had my support, and now more than ever she needs my support,'' said Juana Villanueva of Newark, who has TPS and has an 18-year-old, U.S.-born daughter. “I am very worried if they cancel TPS.”

The United States offers Temporary Protected Status to citizens of countries ravaged by natural disasters, armed conflict or other catastrophes. TPS was extended to citizens of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1998, killing about 7,000 people. Since then, the program has been extended in 18-month increments under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

But the Trump administration, which has taken a tough stance on immigration, has already announced it will terminate TPS for several countries that have had the designation for years.

Currently, more than 430,000 people from 10 countries are living in the United States with TPS. The administration has announced that citizens with TPS from five of those countries, including El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Nepal, must leave in 2019.

TPS for Honduras was set to expire on Jan. 5, but in November, the acting secretary of homeland security, Elaine Duke, concluded that additional time was needed to make a decision, so the designation was extended by six months.

Immigrants and advocates rallied in Newark in August on behalf of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status.(Photo: Monsy Alvarado/NorthJersey.com)

Jose Acosta of Jersey City is among the Honduran TPS holders anxiously awaiting word about the future of the program. Acosta, who arrived in the United States in 1998, now works in sanitation and is the main provider for his family, which consists of three U.S.-born children ages 8, 11 and 16.

"The truth is we have been here so many years, and we have made a life here,'' he said. "This is complicated for TPS holders from Honduras and other countries. We just don’t know what will happen. Will they take TPS from us? If they do, we won’t be able to work or provide for our families here or back home.

"If they force us to go to Honduras, it will be tragic because the country is so bad,'' he added. Only a few years ago, in 2013, Honduras had the highest homicide rate in the world and the plague of violence has prompted thousands to flee north in recent years. Many Hondurans are part of a caravan of immigrants who are awaiting entrance to the United States at the southern border in California and who plan to seek asylum. The immigrant caravan has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump, who has said in posts to Twitter that it is an example of why the United States needs to tighten its immigration laws.